The test was carried out on the network of an unnamed “major US carrier”.

Nokia said such speed will enable carriers to sell latency-sensitive enterprise services, such as network slicing for mission-critical applications.

Dual connectivity

The record speed was achieved by combining eight 100 MHz channels of mmWave spectrum on the 28GHz and 39GHz bands, providing 800 MHz of bandwidth, and 40 MHz of LTE spectrum using the dual connectivity (EN-DC) functionality available on Nokia’s AirScale solution.

EN-DC allows devices to connect simultaneously to 5G and LTE networks, transmitting and receiving data across both air-interface technologies.

This means devices can achieve a higher throughput than when connecting to 5G or LTE alone. The speeds were achieved on both 5G cloud-based (vRAN) and classic baseband configurations.

Nokia’s AirScale Radio Access is a commercial end-to-end 5G solution that offers capacity scaling, and low latency and connectivity by enabling all air-interface technologies on the same radio access equipment.

Carrier aggregation

Stéphane Téral, Chief Analyst at LightCounting Market Research, said, “[The…8-component carrier aggregation in the millimeter wave domain shows the world that there is more than massive MIMO and open RAN to not only truly deliver the promise of commercial 5G, but also pave the way for future Terahertz system.”

Tommi Uitto, President of Mobile Networks at Nokia, commented, “This…demonstrates the confidence operators have in our global end-to-end portfolio and the progress we have made to deliver the best possible 5G experiences to customers. We already supply our mmWave radios to all of the major US carriers and we look forward to continuing to work closely with them moving forward.”